More on Git 2.8: push, grep, rebase, config neat things

March 31, 2016 2 min read
Nicola Paolucci
Nicola Paolucci
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Hear Hear, the new Git 2.8.0 release is out! In the past couple of weeks, while the release candidate cycle was ongoing, I went through the commits and release notes trying the new things and scribbling down the interesting bits. To save you time here is a subjective selection of things to try out. Enjoy!

push -d is a synonym of push --delete

This is a nice addition for both consistency and speed of typing. You could already use git branch -d to delete a branch locally, and now you can shorten remote branch deletion to git push -d as well. Example:


git branch -d my-branch #deletes the branch locally if it's already been merged
git push -d origin my-branch #deletes the remote branch at origin

git grep: Threading and recursive protection

A couple of relevant things have been integrated into grep‘s functionality:

  1. You can now specify how many threads grep should use while searching the working tree objects. Add --num-threads to the command line or add configuration flag grep.threads in .gitconfig to make it persistent. Example: 
    
    git grep --num-threads=5 <pattern>
  2. If you ran git grep in a non-git folder, Git could run a huge recursive search up the folders which was not necessarily intended. In this latest version if you really want to use grep outside a Git repository, you have to explicitly provide the --no-index flag. This safety can be disabled via a flag by the name of grep.fallbackToNoIndex.

pull --rebase supports interactive mode

git pull --rebase can now be run interactively asgit pull --rebase=interactive. This is an interesting addition to the pull rebase  workflow for when you want to quickly squash commits or edit the commit messages at the time of the pull. Usual rebase warnings apply.

Ask git config anything 😉

Git config can now show where a value was set whether in a file, loaded from standard input, a blob, or directly from the command line. For example I may ask: “Where did I set my st (status) alias?” git config can now tell me:


git config --show-origin alias.st

file:/Users/np/.gitconfig       status -s

Other sparse tidbits

  • Eye-candy progress bar for long running git blame was added.
  • A new notation in the form of <branch>^{/!-<pattern>} is now available. It

    allows you to refer to a commit that is reachable from <branch> but does not match the given <pattern>.

  • git fetch can be configured to use only ipv4 (or ipv6). Invoke it as git fetch -4 or git fetch -6 respectively.
  • Command pattern git worktree add -B <branchname> was not working as intended and is fixed now.

Next steps

The above notes are just a selection, the release contains much more! For other features included go to the source and see the full release notes. Also if you happen to be in New York next week come join the Git community at Git Merge!

Finally, if you want to keep in touch with me and hear of the latest things on Git and other tech endeavours,